“The fights are around many of the same issues,” said Billy Fleming, a director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design who specializes in climate change adaptation. Up and down US coastlines, cities as diverse as New York, Charleston, Norfolk, Houston and San Francisco are staring down the same dilemma: tall concrete walls could technically protect homes and property from seas rising because of climate change, but the proposals are so potentially hideous that some locals are rejecting them.
Seawall at low tide along the Plymouth, Massachusetts, shoreline waterfront.
“At what point are people not going to want to live here any more because of the solution they’re proposing, which is so destructive to our community and our identity.” “Miami is all about our connection to the water,” said Rachel Silverstein, executive director of the environmental research and advocacy group Miami Waterkeeper. But the residents, environmentalists, businesspeople and politicians battling to amend this recent seawall proposal see the fight in existential terms: they are trying to preserve the soul of the city. It might seem frivolous to focus on the aesthetics of a project that proponents hope will protect Miami from future storm surges that could flatten homes and kill thousands of people – a danger growing more dire each day due to climate change. That helped galvanize an opposition which became so intense that now the project is going back to the drawing board. Miami’s Downtown Development Authority, which was reportedly alarmed by the prospect of hulking concrete slabs, brought in an architectural firm that created renderings portraying the seawall plan as an almost dystopian vision of the future, featuring grey walls defaced with graffiti reading “Berlin” circling a moat of dirty water. But the idea of an imposing seawall was also – in the eyes of many residents – unforgivably ugly.
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